Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday

By Jennani Durai

Shortlisted for Singapore Literature Prize 2018

A teenager discovers his grandfather's secret identity only after his death. A young immigrant to 1940s Singapore is convinced the end-times are nigh. A man is tasked with bringing the corpse of his estranged brother home from Phuket. A reporter is torn between doing her a job and respecting her friend's privacy. From obituaries and job ads to crime reports and horoscopes, Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday is a collection of ten short stories connected by the motif of newspapers, and the unexpected ways they end up affecting our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Epigram Books
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9789814785235

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

BY NG YI-SHENG

I FIRST MET Jennani Durai on Saturday, 23 March 2013, at the launch of Eastern Heathens at The Arts House. According to her, our encounter was brief: I went up to her, asked, Are you Jennani?, thrust a token royalty payment of $20 into her hand, then rushed off elsewhere to worry about logistics.

Despite my ungraciousness, I was actually pretty delighted to make her acquaintance. I’d seen her by-line in The Straits Times, and I’d been charmed by the story she’d submitted for the anthology. My co-editor Amanda Lee Koe and I had sent out an open call for short fiction inspired by Asian myths and legends. Most of our submissions were works of fantasy, retelling epic tales of gods and monsters. Jennani’s was different: Tenali Raman Redux was based on one of the fables of the South Indian jester poet and folk hero Tenali Raman, reimagining him as an incarcerated con-man, still merrily working his plots from behind the walls of Changi Prison.

That story was Jennani’s first published work of fiction. Back then, I had no idea that it would lead to a solo collection, the very volume you hold in your hands. What binds this book’s stories together is the motif of the newspaper—the eponymous compendium of Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday—an object that exerts its influence in diverse and subtle ways throughout the book: as the site of horoscopes in Inexplicably, a story contest in Yours Truly, Vimala, a job advert in Revelation to Amala Rose and movie listings in PG13. It even shows how a young woman’s pride can end up shredded into kitty litter in Never Have I Ever.

Yet there’s something else that draws these tales together. Perhaps it’s because I’m still viewing Jennani’s oeuvre through the lens of Tenali Raman Redux, but I can’t help but feel she’s a bit of a trickster figure herself, rejoicing in the whimsical absurdities of human experience, cleverly delivering us to unexpected conclusions. Her scenarios are often wonderfully bizarre: in Funeral Gifts, a dead grandfather is revealed to be a gangster; in The Employee’s Guide to Transporting Customers to Mexico, a restaurant manager pretends that his mixed-race Singaporean waitstaff are Latino. Beneath it all, however, there’s an undercurrent of soulfulness: the grief of losing a loved one, the despair of seeing one’s dreams come to naught. Tenali Raman may be a master manipulator, but he’s still in chains.

Race also plays a part in these stories. These are tales of the South Indian diaspora, principally—though not exclusively—centred on the Singaporean Tamil experience. As ethnic minorities, Jennani’s protagonists lead lives informed by tradition and prejudice. Witness how, in Yours Truly, Vimala, the Tamil Nesan valiantly fights to preserve their mother tongue, declaring, If young people do not start speaking Tamil in social situations, the language will die a painful death with no one left to mourn it. Nevertheless, these characters are not portrayed as victims of their cultural baggage. They have the freedom and agency to befriend and date people of other races. They are intelligent, foolish and flawed. In short, they’re human.

Right now, there’s a boom taking place in Singaporean short fiction. A new wave of prose writers has hit our shelves: names like Cyril Wong, Alfian Sa’at, O Thiam Chin, Jon Gresham, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Amanda Lee Koe, JY Yang and, of course, Jennani herself. They describe our city-state from hitherto unglimpsed perspectives, and our world is far richer as a result. However, this phenomenon would not have been possible without publishers like Epigram Books, who have taken chances on emerging authors, and it could not have thrived without readers like yourself, who are eager to hear these voices.

So thank you for choosing Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday. Jennani’s voice is vital, fresh and important. May this be the first of many books to come.

Ng Yi-Sheng

July 2017

FUNERAL GIFTS

IT WAS MY uncle who first made the discovery. As his father’s only son, the less-than-pleasant task of ceremonially bathing his corpse had fallen to him. He had wanted to outsource this particular labour of love to the casket company, but my grandmother insisted he do it. When he turned his father over to wash his back, he yelled, dropped my grandfather’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor and ran from the room.

I was ordered to retrieve him and so was in a position to confirm it: Thaathaa had a tell-tale tattoo on his left buttock, identifying him as a key leader of a group I had only heard about in whispers at school until now—BP Pettai, or BPP.

Funnily enough, this was the same group that was said to be behind the parang slashings in Bukit Panjang Park the week before. I mentioned this to my grandmother and received a stinging slap across the face. Don’t be an idiot, she told me. Only Chinese people have gangs.

She assumed no more would be said on the subject to lend the notion any credence, so when my mother and uncle sat themselves around the table to discuss what, if anything, should be done about this surprising revelation, my grandmother entered a state of denial that would have been acceptable had it not also been belligerent. From her wheelchair, she rapped each of her children across the legs under the table for daring to suggest such an alternate reality, and would have started on me too, if I hadn’t cottoned on and addressed her only from afar. My grandmother bellowed that her good husband would be turning over in his grave—had he already been in it—if he could hear what his ungrateful children were now saying about him. Her husband, an honest man who worked hard to provide for their family! She insisted that everyone had misinterpreted what they had seen, that it was not a tattoo but a birthmark, or a liver spot, contoured by the deep wrinkles of nine decades on this earth. What did they know of old age and how a buttock might look after ninety years, she demanded angrily of her children. She asked to be shown the mark, to disprove this theory once and for all, but then started screaming when my uncle approached the corpse to lift his veshti, saying there was no end to the disgrace her evil children would put their dead father through. She might have continued down this path indefinitely for all I know, if the gangsters hadn’t started arriving.

The first of them were on our doorstop within the hour. My uncle and I had already sent the casket company workers away, saying that we wanted more time to prepare and dress the body ourselves, and that we would call them closer to the start of the wake. I searched the two young workers’ faces for signs that they had spotted the tattoo during the embalming, but they looked nothing but sympathetic. We were all taking turns to shower post corpse contact per my grandmother’s instructions when we heard the doorbell. My mother ran to let in the two elderly Indian men, elegantly clad in black Nehrucollared suits with chunky rings on nearly every finger, assuming them to be old friends of her parents. I’m so sorry, but the wake isn’t for another few hours and the casket isn’t ready yet, she explained, offering them a seat in our dining room.

Please don’t apologise, one of them said. We know we are early.

My mother excused herself and left the room to fetch my grandmother, but by the time she had wheeled her in, the guests were gone; the only indication that they had ever been there was a fat envelope of money marked in thick black ink with a symbol we had already seen once that morning, resting on top of the dining room table.

It was not clear which of them started screaming first, but they both blamed the other for causing my uncle and me to come running. My uncle, who had run out of the shower in a towel with shampoo still in his hair, stared briefly at the envelope before turning to head back to the bathroom, calling over his shoulder to ask his mother if she was convinced yet.

My grandmother, to her credit, managed to calm herself down enough after the initial bout of screaming to wheel herself over to the table—a feat we didn’t know she was capable of until now—and reach for the envelope to examine it more closely. Don’t leave fingerprints, said my mother in a screech-whisper, but my grandmother ignored her. She counted all the money, and I waited nearby, hoping she would announce the final tally once she was done, but she slipped the money back into the envelope, and held it in her lap, wordlessly.

She sat in silence until my mother had visibly calmed down too, and then announced that it did not make any sense. How could I not know, she said, with the intonation of a statement rather than a question, but I guessed that it was a mix of both.

That Thaathaa was a gangster or that there were gangs at all? I asked, helpfully trying to clear up the matter, but my mother shut me up with a whack to the side of the head.

He hid it from us Ma, he hid it from us all, my mother started, but my grandmother interrupted: He was not that good of a liar. My husband was not like your husband.

What? my mother asked faintly, and I was impressed that even in a moment of betrayal and anguish my grandmother had still found enough malice in her heart to make a jibe about my long-gone father.

My grandmother looked over at me, and then trained her eyes into the distance. I always knew when he had been with someone else. He would come up with many reasons to explain his lateness, and I would pretend to believe them, but I could always sense a woman’s scent on him. I could always tell where he had actually been, she said.

It occurred to both my mother and me that either my grandfather had been the best of liars, inventing one lie to cover another, or that my grandmother had built up an impressive layer of self-delusion. We shared a knowing look but were saved from having to respond by the arrival of more mourners, this time in a group of five or six—youngish men with rat tails and thick gold chains around their necks, who had evidently taken some pains to dress in long-sleeves and button their collars to hide their heavily tattooed bodies. But there was nothing they could have done about the ink on their faces: short, identical lines of dots on their foreheads that even my grandmother could apparently recognise well enough. She sat up straight at the sight of them, and moved as though to get up, before giving up and beginning to cry.

I’d expected her to start yelling again, so the sudden appearance of tears alarmed me. I hurried over and began to wheel her out of the room, making sure to bow my head in an overt gesture of respect to the trained killers who were now traipsing into my family’s flat. My mother shot me a look of mixed annoyance and terror at my leaving her alone with them, but she quickly made herself deferential and left also, purportedly to get them cold drinks.

My grandmother was still crying noisily when I wheeled her into her bedroom and shut the door behind us. It’s okay, Paati, I tried, in my best soothing, level voice, even though this was the most exciting thing to ever happen to our family. You really didn’t know. You didn’t even know there were Indian gangs in Singapore. I’d thought this would be a comforting thing to say, but as soon as I said it and her head whipped up, I knew I had belittled her further.

She stopped crying momentarily to hiccup a few times in quick succession, evidently the effort of trying to get too much speech out in too short a time. Now I feel even more stupid, she said, lifting up her shawl to dry her eyes. All this time I was married to the biggest Indian gangster of them all.

Well, we don’t know that he was the biggest, I said, feeling the situation was getting a little bit away from us, while still enjoying a slight thrill from the thought that I might be the grandson of the feared patriarch of an Indian secret society. Maybe I had even been walking in Bukit Panjang Park one day and some gang members had considered slashing me with a parang, but the older members—those in the know—had restrained them. That’s Ramachandran’s grandson, they might have whispered urgently, don’t even think about touching him.

I wisely elected not to share this particular fantasy with my grandmother, whose sobs were now fading. She was staring into the distance, her eyes a mixture of despair and resignation. This was the longest conversation I had had